First, Michael Walker trained a Markov Chain on the King James Bible and a computer science textbook, “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs,” producing the King James Programming bible.
And Satan stood up against them in the table used by the programs external to the enclosing procedure
Who immediately took soldiers and centurions, and ran down unto them: and when the sun went down, and came to Beersheba, which belongeth to Judah, and said, We will not attempt to print the statistics: print-result (perform (op announce-output) (const “;;; EC-Eval value:”)) (perform (op user-print) (reg val)) (goto (label read-eval-print-loop))
Fun, but then Charles Stross does him one better: witness the Lovebible, a mash-up of the King James Bible and the complete works of H.P. Lovecraft:
the backwoods folk -had glimpsed the battered mantel, rickety furniture, and ragged draperies. It spread over it a robber, a shedder of blood, when I listened with mad intentness. At last you know! At last to come to see me. Now Absalom.
the bed, and make thee borders of gold with studs of silver. 1:12 While the case histories, to expect. As mental atmosphere. His eyes were pits of a hundred and fifty shekels, 30:24 And he laughed mockingly at the village summoning.
Finally, a translation of the Bible that captures the original feel of the text!
Not bad for a first attempt. Hopefully Stross or someone else will keep tweaking it and we’ll see the results smooth out – although this early stuff has the appropriate disjointedness for the ravings of a man driven insane by things from beyond the stars. Stross does has one worry though:
I wonder: if I run it for long enough, will it emit a fully-formed draft of the Necronomicon?
… aaaand I’m not reading anything more from Stross until it’s been sanity-tested on someone else first.